This Canadian Idol runner-up's super-hit Call Me Maybe – the UK's second-biggest single of 2012 – was a polarising experience. A surprising number of people, not all of them prepubescent, deemed it to be in the Robyn league of electro-pop perfection; the rest heard a robo-track sung by a woman who needed Auto-Tune just to give her twittering some clout. On this album, her voice is still her Achilles heel; she's a 26-year-old who sounds 16, and a colourless 16 at that. In Jepsen's hands, her surprisingly soul-scouring lyrics (this, from the strings-and-synths concoction Curiosity, gives you the gist of her love life: "I'm sick with love, sick like a disease/ Don't call me up just so I can please you") are divested of all emotion. Set against Dallas Austin and Max Martin's overprocessed beats, she can't help but fail, as Canadian Idol would put it, to "own" the songs. But there's an unexpected plus point: a sweet duet with Justin Bieber on the faux-folk ballad Beautiful that suggests that neither artist is completely irredeemable.